Notes

William Kentridge has developed a mode of working in which ideas and procedures for projects seed new works from entirely different projects. These two lots, both inspired by a 2009 production for New York’s Metropolitan Opera, are a case in point. In 2008, Kentridge was invited to make a short film to be projected on the fire screen of the Teatro La Fenice, an opera house in Venice. Working experimentally from drawings in his studio, Kentridge, together with sculptor Gerhard Marx, devised a series of seemingly abstract sculptures that, when rotated on a base and viewed from a particular angle by his film camera, achieved formal legibility and figural coherence.

The idea for the project was a response to the absurdity of producing a film piece that would be viewed casually in anticipation of a theatrical event, amidst the discord of the orchestra tuning their instruments. “The chaos of the project is mirrored by the piece being about chaos, disintegration and regathering,” stated Kentridge.¹ The logic of the rotating sculptures relies on “monocular vision,” explained the artist, “because you have to see a three-dimensional object as a two-dimensional shape. So it’s the opposite of Renaissance painting where you have a flat image trying to look three-dimensional.”²

The sculpture lot on offer here rehearses the technical procedures and conceptual premise of the Fenice sculptures, but in subject refers to Kentridge’s acclaimed production of Dimitri Shostakovich’s 1930 opera, The Nose, for the Metropolitan Opera. Based on Nikolai Gogol's 1836 story of the same name, the plot concerns Kovalyov, a Russian official whose nose leaves his face and develops a life of its own, even achieving a higher social rank. The coherent image nested in the rotating sculpture refers to key scenes in the opera of Kovalyov’s human-sized nose strutting around St. Petersburg.

Drawing is central to Kentridge’s genre-spanning practice, more often than not providing the initial formal resolution for an idea. All of Kentridge’s rotating sculptures began life as drawings pasted on his studio wall, which he and his collaborators iterated into solid forms. The three drawings on offer here refer to moments of “fragmentation” and “provisional coherence” key to an appreciation of Kentridge’s rotating sculpture.³ The legible motif of the perambulating nose was arrived at incrementally, as is evident from its appearance in earlier works on paper from 2007 (notably the lithographs Traité D'Arithmétique, News from Nowhere and Wittgenstein's Rhinoceros). Repetition and adaptation is central to Kentridge’s working method.

1. William Kentridge (2010) “Return”, Art21, 19 February: https://art21.org/watch/extended-play/william-kentridge-return-short/
2. John Lloyd (2009) "Interview: William Kentridge at Teatro La Fenice", Tate Etc, issue 15, Spring: https://www.tate.org.uk/tate-etc/issue-15-spring-2009/interview-william-kentridge-teatro-la-fenice
3. William Kentridge (2020) William Kentridge: Why Should I Hesitate: Sculpture, Cape Town & Cologne, Norval Foundation & Koenig Books. Page 102

Provenance

Johans Borman Fine Art, Cape Town.

Private Collection.

Exhibited

Goodman Gallery, Cape Town, William Kentridge: (REPEAT) from the beginning, 12 December 2008 to 17 January 2009.